Anyone who knows me will tell you that 1) Luke hates piracy. 2) Luke hates any sort of attempted justification of piracy. 3) Luke is willing to beat his dead horse of anti-piracy arguments any time you want. Just ask, and Luke will giveth his speech (rant) liberally to all man, and upbraideth not. And so when I found an interesting titled blog on a gaming news site I frequent, 1Up.com, I saw an opportunity to begin ranting about piracy. Link to said blog:
http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=9097566
To save you some trouble, the blog is titled, "When is Piracy OK?". Obviously the answer from me is going to be never, but the guy brings up some points. After identifying himself as an anti-piracy man, he says that he thinks piracy is acceptable when you can't find the game any more in stores, and the company won't make money off of it if you buy a used copy off of eBay or Amazon, or whatever other shopping site you want to use. Alright, that makes sense, I can buy that. In fact, I've given that some thought as well. The conclusion I've come to? That isn't piracy. At the point where the company is no longer getting funds for the sale of a game, and the game isn't available anywhere besides for collectors, downloading a copy to play on an emulator isn't piracy to me, or any other rational person. But if you want to call it piracy, fine. I can agree with this.
So far so good on this guys thoughts, but he soon spirals down into the pit that many a person has found themselves going into. A major problem with piracy is the addictive nature of well, getting free stuff. I know so many people that haven't bought an album for as long as they can remember, and they balk at the idea of anyone paying actual money for music. As a result, people who want to dabble in piracy quickly find themselves in the situation where spending money on things seems silly in comparison to simply taking what you want. Anyway, back to the blog. The guy continues on for a bit, but then says something that's just weird; "Finally I would like to say that I have no issue with people downloading pirated versions of Street Fighter X Tekken." What? Are you serious? Claim to be anti-piracy and then whip out a statement like that? Capcom must be killing puppies and using baby seal skins as covers for him to so quickly renounce his such deeply-vested beliefs. In reality, Capcom is trying to make some extra money off of Street Fighter X Tekken and employing the pretty unpopular concept of money-unlock-able content. And thus we see, the slippery slope.
This is the same slippery slope that led to rampant piracy in the first place. It starts out roses and daisies, rational reasons, and then all of a sudden it all comes down to the fact you can have something for free with little to no consequence. Literally his way of protesting this "unfair" scheme of Capcom's to make more money is to not buy the game, but he still wants to play it. So he justified in his own mind that "he wasn't going to buy the game anyway." Therein lies the reason I hate justification of piracy. Compromise with things like this quickly leads to complete surrender, which is something that I refuse to be a part of. I don't formulate this argument very well, but my question becomes why do I need a reason to argue against piracy? Its illegal, its stealing, its everything bad about consumerism in this world. When did we get to a point where everything I just listed is OK, even accepted?
Since I've been repeating myself for awhile, I'm just going to leave anyone besides Mr. Level who reads this (he can listen to it too if he wants.) with this; don't start downloading things and becoming a part of piracy. I don't care what reasons you have, don't start. You will never stop. Piracy is stealing, despite what the internet has to say (I can elaborate on this if you want, but its better not to be a complete idiot and say that piracy isn't stealing.) and it does devastate sales and potential sales of gaming companies and musical artists that have put time and money into something they love. Don't fall down the slippery slope, and stop pirating things that we aren't entitled to. You'll appreciate what you have so much more if you work for it, and buy it yourself.
/end rant
Getting the blog post done early this week, woooo!
MountainCrewOfTwo
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